The first call now begins with a search

A1. The research question

When someone dies, or when someone plans ahead, and a family looks an independent funeral home up online, usually on a phone and often late at night, can they find the General Price List, what cremation or a burial costs, a number to call at any hour, the obituaries and service times, whether a service can be watched from far away, how to plan ahead, whether the home can honour their faith or culture, what help there is afterwards, how to get there, and whether other families vouch for the home?

Population. Independently owned US funeral homes with one to three locations and their own website, in four groups: single-location family funeral homes, family firms with two or three locations, cremation-focused independent providers with their own local office, and funeral homes that serve a faith or cultural community. These are the funeral businesses a small or mid-size web agency can realistically win as clients.

A2. Who was studied

The sample was built from local search listings, city by city, then screened so that every site in it is one an independent agency could realistically win.

A3. How the sites were read

Pages. The home page, then for each of fourteen topics (price list, cremation, burial and funeral services, services, when a death occurs, obituaries, livestreams, pre-planning, religious and cultural traditions, grief support, about, reviews, contact, directions) the best-matching link on the home page.

Speed and accessibility. Google PageSpeed Insights (Lighthouse) on a mid-range phone profile and on desktop, plus Chrome UX Report data from real visitors over the previous 28 days where Google publishes it for the site.

Crawler conduct. One request at a time to each site, at least 400 ms apart, at most fifteen pages per site; robots.txt is read and obeyed for every page requested; a site that refuses is left out and never retried. The crawler identifies itself as Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ClikitiResearch/1.0; +https://clikiti.com).

A4. What was measured

10 questions families ask when a death occurs, or when they plan ahead, answered from what each site publishes, and 4 technical checks against published standards. A check passes only when the rule below is met; anything the crawler cannot confirm counts as not answered.

A5. The website score

Each site's overall score (0 to 100) is Clikiti's website score, rubric 2.0.0. It measures the website, not the funeral home, and the family questions above do not feed it. It is a weighted mean of five pillars:

Within a pillar, each issue costs points by severity (critical, high, medium, low) and by how many times it occurs; issues based on judgement count at 70% of measured ones, and duplicates of the same root cause count once. On the four funeral home profiles, the number out of 100 is this overall score, and each dot is one check in its group: filled when the site passes it, hollow when it does not.

A6. Precision

With 175 sites, a share reported for the whole sample is precise to within ±7.4 percentage points at 95% confidence (worst case, a 50% share; 1.96 × √(0.25/n)). By type: family funeral homes, one location ±12.3 (n = 64); family firms with two or three locations ±13.3 (n = 54); cremation-focused providers ±16.1 (n = 37); faith and cultural community homes ±21.9 (n = 20). Differences between types smaller than these margins should be read as similar. Percentages are rounded to whole numbers; medians are the middle value of the sites in a group.

A7. Quality control

• Every home page in the cohort was fetched and its title checked against the listed funeral home before scanning
• Every home page was checked for hijacked content (gambling, pharmacy, adult and crypto spam) before scanning
• Every home page was checked for a second website of the same funeral home (shared phone numbers and names)
• Detection rules were checked against the evidence they record for a sample of funeral homes in every group, and revised before the final run
• Every published figure is recomputed from the data at build time, and a statement in the text that the data does not support stops the build
• Results are published only after automated checks for missing data, anonymity, accessibility of the report itself and the margin of error statement pass

A8. Limitations

• A point-in-time snapshot: sites change, and a site may have improved or declined since it was read.
• Only public pages were read: the home page and pages it links to. Price lists inside PDF files were counted when linked, but their contents were not read.
• Answers are read from the page as a server delivers it. Content that only appears after scripts run in the browser (some obituary and review widgets) is not seen, which the study counts as a gap a search engine or a slow phone would also meet.
• 10 candidates blocked automated visitors or served them a bot challenge and are not in the study; sites behind such protection may differ from those studied.
• The study reports what a website shows. It does not judge any funeral home's care, services or prices, it is not legal advice, and it does not judge compliance with the FTC Funeral Rule or any state law.
• Automated accessibility tests find only part of what WCAG covers; keyboard and screen-reader use need a manual audit.
• The sample is a structured list of real, independent funeral homes, not a random draw. Margins of error are given as a guide to precision, not as a guarantee that the results hold for every funeral home in the country.
• Most candidates outside the first local searches came from a memorial supplier's partner directory and a Jewish funeral directors' member list; homes that work with such a supplier or belong to such an association may differ from other independent homes.

A9. Data, licence and corrections

The aggregate results are published as CSV and JSON beside this report under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence: you may reuse, adapt and share them, including in client proposals, with a credit to Clikiti and a link. No per-site results are published. Corrections and removal requests are reviewed and answered personally; see the end of this report.